Many thanks for your patience during the scheduled site outage last Friday. During the down time our development team deployed many exciting new features and enhancements, including a new tool for changing your plan level online! Any active (non-Multiseat subaccount) Shoeboxed customer can now upgrade and downgrade their account between Business, Classic, and Lite, and even change from a monthly to annual plan from their Shoeboxed account. Using the updated Pricing Plans page under Account and Settings you can select a new plan level, preview the change in billing, and confirm the change. It’s that easy! Please stay tuned for additional blog posts about other new tools and improvements....

Happy Friday, Shoefans! If you happened to miss the announcement we posted in your Shoeboxed online account earlier this week, here’s a quick reminder that our developers will be taking down the site for maintenance on Friday, May 20 at 7pm EDT. The site should be back up and running better than ever by 2am EDT. This release lays the groundwork for new features and other improvements that you will be seeing over the coming weeks. Thanks and have a great...

If you’re in a management position of any kind, I challenge you to ask yourself the following questions: When and how often do I offer praise to my employees? Why do I offer praise to my employees? And finally, how do I offer praise to my employees. Sorry, but contrived Employee of the Month programs don’t count. If you find that you tend to focus on poor performance and other problems among employees instead of their hard work and successes, you could be jeopardizing employee morale and productivity. Here are seven tips for improving your skills at recognizing and praising your team members for their achievements: Don’t confuse compliments with praise: Telling an employee that you like her new haircut is not an example of praise, it’s a compliment. Compliments, while nice, will not have the impact on employee morale and productivity that praise has. Praise should not be treated as a vehicle for making your employees like you, though this may be an added benefit of learning how...

During the month of May, we are giving away $50 USD to anyone who joins our Affiliate Program and refers at least one new user to Shoeboxed. Why would we do such a crazy thing, you ask? We’re just grateful for your support and your help in spreading the word about Shoeboxed, and we’re happy to put our money where our, er, your mouth is. And let’s be honest, money talks and Ulysses S. Grant is much better at saying thank you than we are. Follow these 3 quick steps to receive your Nifty $50 (available for US, Canada and Australia only)! 1. Fill out this quick form to join the Shoeboxed Affiliate Program (it’s free and only takes a couple minutes, seriously!). Already an affiliate? Skip to Step 2. 2. Next, you’ll receive an email from CJ.com that contains your account identification number. Send that number to affiliates [at] team.shoeboxed.com. You can also log into your CJ.com account to retrieve that number. 3. We will reply to your...

From the coffee maker in your break room to the computer you’re using to read this blog post, you likely rely on a lot of things, particularly energy-consuming things, to run your business. The administrative tasks associated with buying, insuring, using, and maintaining these things can be tedious, time-consuming work. Fortunately, a free online tool called MyEnergyThings now offers an easier way for you to keep track of important information related to all of your things, helping you save time, money and energy. To put it simply, MyEnergyThings helps you keep track of all of your things. It gives you a centralized place to store the answers to important questions about your business’ machinery, appliances and electronics including how much your things cost, where you bought them, when you bought them, when their warranties expire, whom to contact with questions, when they were last serviced and when they need to be serviced next. The app’s helpful email reminders keep you apprised of key dates like looming service appointments or...